Artikelen

Music is emotion. You can improve and improve the lyrics, the orchestrals, the vocal lines, but in the end if there’s no emotion in it, all the perfectionism has been for nothing. It’s better to play simple and lay your emotion in your playing, than to play ingenious but clean. Every musician has ever experienced the phenomenon to have been playing so long that the music is dead. When you rehearse to much, the emotion vanishes and the music is dead. The listeners will hear it. Great singers and musicians always are praised for their expression. In the previous secrets I discussed the tremendous perfectionism of ABBA and the enormous amount of work they put into it. All the layers in orchestra as well as in vocals. Multiple versions of songs. Different lyrics and so on. The quality of ABBA is that in spite of so many work they always kept that emotional load. It’s more than perfect, as a listener you simply feel what they mean. You hear the pleasure they must have had in creating it. Not only in the head lines, but even every part in the background has that emotional touch. It is sheer love. The performance is so good that the atmosphere could not be improved even in a live performance. ABBA in the studio sings and plays with an enthousiasm as if they stand before a live audience. It’s the atmosphere that counts, that’s what you hear, that’s what you feel when you’re listening to ABBA. In the end that’s the secret of any artist. The secret of ABBA is they were capable of holding the emotional expression in combination with their perfectionism on other aspects.

Still there is more to tell about ABBA. The next secret will appear on july 1st, 2015.